Lorne Gunter: It’s official. Lemonade stands are illegal

You know the nanny state has overgrown itself when it starts trying to regulate the initiative of enterprising pre-teens. It’s hard to know who to blame more — bylaw officers for the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam or the sour-pickle park patron who ratted on Mackenzie Burke Sikorra and Alex Pederson for operating a lemonade stand inside a city park.

Burke Sikorra and Pederson, both 12, had been selling lemonade, popcorn and home-baked dog treats just inside the gates of popular Shaugnessy Park for much of the summer. They were trying to raise money for uniforms for Mackenzie’s soccer team. But last week, based on a complaint by a resident, PoCo city officials rousted the boys from their location near the park’s dog run because the pair lacked a business licence. Besides, bylaw services manager Dan Scoones told the newspaper Coquitlam Now, “no one’s allowed to sell things in a city park. If we allowed this … the next thing we would know, we would have two hot dog carts at the dog park and we would have two ice cream carts at the dog park.”

Oh, no. Imagine the chaos and mayhem if park users were satiated and refreshed.

Mr. Scoones has a point. Park patrons would not welcome being hassled by every peddler, hawkster or pitchman with a cart or cooler. But like all zero-tolerance policies that remove common sense from consideration, Port Coquitlam’s prohibition on commercial sales in parks is doomed to absurdity because of its rigidity.

Burke Sikorra and Pederson were hurting no one, except a solitary, uptight dog walker who couldn’t bear that thought that even two young boys with few other money-making opportunities might sell some glasses of icy refreshment to willing buyers.

What sort of sad, anti-social individual would seek to bring down the power of the state on the heads of two young boys who were giving up part of their summer for a good cause? The sort, we suppose, who would vote for councillors who approve no-exception bylaws.

This reminds me of the 2003 case in which provincial workers uprooted flowers planted by cottagers in a Saskatchewan provincial park because the blossoms had not be planted by authorized government employees. Imagination-free bureaucrats often find the letter of the law more important than the spirit and so lose all perspective in its enforcement.

Get a grip, Port Coquitlam, Mackenzie and Alex are just kids. What’s next, stopping teenagers from cutting lawns because they lack permits to compost the clippings?